À la recherche des pubs perdus – Frank McNally on visiting Paris again

Back in Paris for a weekend after a few years of absence, I arrived hungry off the bus at Porte Maillot and not feeling quite up to the challenges of a proper restaurant. Instead, remembering that France would be playing Belgium in the football shortly, I thought I'd watch the game over a burger and pints in the nearby James Joyce pub.

That's when I realised there is no James Joyce pub anymore. The premises has fallen among Canadians since I was there last. Although the layout is unchanged, it has been shorn of shamrocks and literary references and is now called The Canadian Embassy. Worse, its TVs were showing something called tennis, although maybe that was because the football hadn't kicked off yet.

Later, I discovered that another of the city’s longer-established Irish bars, the Coolin, is also no more. It used to sponsor the Paris Gaels GAA club, so that you could buy the jersey with your pint. But that also closed, several years ago.

By way of making me feel even older, yet another former haunt, a place called WOS (short for Wide Open Space) – Australian, but near the Irish Cultural Centre and also good for football – is now "The Oaken Shield". Despite the olde-English name, it has become a "gamers bar", whatever that means.

The Holiday and the Ivy – Frank McNally on the 130th anniversary of Ivy Day

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Don Juan’s date with destiny – Frank McNally on another great liberator with Kerry roots

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Cat’s Tale – Frank McNally on introducing Joyce’s diabolical children’s story to a new generation

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One-way graphic – Frank McNally on the south-facing statues of Dublin’s main street

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Nothing stands still in Paris, clearly, except the cemeteries. My hotel this time was near the one in Montmartre, so having previously visited Oscar Wilde (at Père Lachaise), and Samuel Beckett (Montparnasse), I finally paid my respects to Myles Byrne, the great Irish rebel soldier who survived the 1798-1803 uprisings and then the Napoleonic wars, to reach old age in Paris.

He also survived threats of deportation after Napoleon's fall, because he was considered an incorrigible Bonapartist. But he died in Paris, aged 82. And after all his struggles for Ireland, they buried him in a part of Montmartre Cemetery called "Avenue des Anglais". Talk about insensitive.

In contrast with Irish bars, Paris’s rat population has thrived in my absence. More than a decade after the film Ratatouille celebrated the species’ love of food, their gourmandising is a problem. Signs in parks now appeal to the public to “Stop aux Rats!” by putting any left-overs in bins.

Near the Bois de Boulogne, I was intrigued by another slogan – graffiti this time – “Enleve ta culotte Paris. La culture te réclame.” It means “Take your knickers off Paris. Culture reclaims you.” And I’m sure that’s just a metaphor for the dangers of being bourgeois, or something, although I’m told that the enlevement of culottes is also an actual and widespread occurrence in the Bois after dark.

I hasten to add that I was there in daylight hours, for a Parkrun. As you may know, Parkruns are an international phenomenon whereby people gather on Saturday mornings to walk or race in free, timed 5ks, staffed by volunteers.

And until last weekend I assumed that, as in Ireland, they started everywhere at 9.30am. Thus, when I caught the Metro to the Paris “Ranelagh” (pronounced with two syllables and a hard G – “Ran-lag” – by the announcer) and then strolled to the starting point at 8.58am, I was counting on half an hour to get changed and warm up.

That's when I discovered that, in England and France, Parkruns are at 9am. At which point, I had to dash in and out of the bushes – another thing that happens a lot there after dark, I'm told – and start running.

Later on Saturday, looking for somewhere to watch the Azerbaijan-Ireland game, I was reassured to find that at least Corcoran’s pub, on Rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, was still in business.

So, nearby, was Shakespeare and Co., which also opened a café a few years back, expanding into the premises next door so that it now stretches along the Seine like a bookshop version of Notre Dame (just opposite and still extensively scaffolded).

There was a queue even to get into the shop when I visited, so I didn't try. But I did finally brave another of the area's celebrity bookstores, the San Francisco Book Company. I say "brave" because it's a tiny shop, without any nooks to hide in while browsing. Also, the proprietor sits, Cerberus-like, just inside the door. It must be awkward to leave without buying something.

Anyway, I steeled myself to enter one night, whereupon Cerberus barked: “We close in two minutes!” Maybe it wasn’t a bark, exactly. But he made it sound like the hours should have been obvious. I was therefore puzzled to see from my watch that it was 8.21pm. Even so, I had to beat a retreat, bookless, and promise to come back another day or year.